Women have wanted intercourse to work and have submittedwith
regret or with enthusiasm, real or fakedeven though or even when it does not. The
reasons have often been foul, filled with the spiteful but carefully hidden malice of the
powerless. Women have needed what can be gotten through intercourse: the economic and
psychological surrival; access to male power through access to the male who has it;
having some holdpsychological, sexual, or economicon the ones who act, who
decide, who matter. There has been a deep, consistent, yet of course muted objection to
what Ana´s Nm has called "[t]he hunter, the rapist, the one for whom sexuality is a
thrust, nothing more."3 Women have also wanted intercourse to work in this
sense: women have wanted intercourse to be, for women, an experience of equality and
passion, sensuality and intimacy. Women have a vision of love that includes men as human
too; and women want the human in men, including in the act of intercourse. Even without
the dignity of equal power, women have believed in the redeeming potential of love. There
has beendespite the cruelty of exploitation and forced sexa consistent vision
for women of a sexuality based on a harmony that is both sensual and possible. In the
words of sex reformer Ellen Key:

She will no longer be captured like a fortress or hunted like a quarry;
now will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way to her embrace. A
stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the other stream.4

A stream herself, she would move over the earth, sensual and equal;
especially, she will go her own way.

Shere Hite has suggested an intercourse in which "thrusting would
not be considered as necessary as it now is... [There might be] more a mutual lying
together in pleasure, penis-in-vagina, vagina-covering-penis, with female orgasm providing
much of the stimulation necessary for male orgasm."5

These visions of a humane s~isuality based in equality are in the
aspirations of women; and even the nightmare of sexual inferiority does not seem to kill
them. They are not searching analyses into the nature of intercourse; instead they are
deep, humane dreams that repudiate the rapist as the final arbiter of reality. They are an
underground resistance to both inferiority and brutality, visions that sustain life and
further endurance.

They also do not amount to much in real life with real men. There is,
instead, the cold fucking, duty-bound or promiscuous; the romantic obsession in which
eventual abandonment turns the vagina into the wound Freud claimed it was; intimacy with
men who dread women, coital dread as Kafka wrote in his diary, "coitus as
punishment for the happiness of being together."6

Fear, too, has a special power to change experience and compromise any
possibility of freedom. A stream does not know fear. A woman does. Especially women know
fear of men and of forced intercourse. Consent in this world of fear is so passive that
the woman consenting could be dead and sometimes is. "Yeah," said one man who
killed a woman so that he could flick her after she was dead, "I sexually assaulted
her after she was dead. I always see them girls laid out in the pictures with their eyes
closed and I just had to do it. I dreamed about it for so long that Ijust had to do
it."1 A Nebraska appeals court did not think that the murder "was
especially heinous, atrocious, cruel, or manifested exceptional depravity by ordinary
standards of morality and intelligence," and in particular they found "no
evidence the acts were performed for the satisfaction of inflicting either mental or
physical pain or that pain existed for any prolonged period of time."8 Are
you afraid now? How can fear and freedom coexist for women in intercourse?

The role of fear in destroying the integrity of men is easy to
articulate, to understand, hard to overstate. Men are supposed to conquer fear in order to
experience freedom. Men are humiliated by fear, not only in their masculinity but in their
rights and freedoms. Men are diminished by fear; compromised irrevocably by it because
freedom is diminished by it. "Fear had entered his life," novelist Iris Murdoch
wrote,

and would now be with him forever. How easy it was for the violent to
win. Fear was irresistible, fear was king, he had never really known this before when he
had lived free and without it. Even unreasoning fear could cripple a man forever.... How
well he understood how dictators flourished. The little grain of fear in each life was
enough to keep millions quiet.9

Hemingway, using harder prose, wrote the same in book after book. But
women are supposed to treasure the little grain of fearrub up against it
eroticize it, want it, get excited by it; and the fear could and does keep millions quiet:
millions of women; being fucked and silent; upright and silent; waiting and silent; rolled
over on and silent; pursued and silent; killed, flicked, and silent. The silence is taken
to be appropriate. The fear is not perceived as compromising or destroying freedom. The
dictators do flourish: flick and flourish.

Out of fear and inequality, women hide, use disguises, trying to pass
for indigenous peoples who have a right to be there, even though we cannot pass.
Appropriating Octavio Pazs description of the behavior of Mexicans in Los
Angeles which he might not like: "they feel ashamed of their origin.., they act
like persons who are wearing disguises, who are afraid of a strangers look because
it could strip them and leave them stark naked."0 Women hide, use
disguises, because fear has compromised freedom; and when a woman has intercoursenot
hiding, dropping the disguiseshe has no freedom because her very being has been
contaminated by fear: a grain, a tidal wave, memory or anticipation.

The fear is fear of power and fear of pain: the child looks at the slit
with a mirror and wonders how it can be, how will she be able to stand the pain. The
culture romanticizes the rapist dimension of the first time: he will force his way in and
hurt her. The event itself is supposed to be so distinct, so entirely unlike any other
experience or category of sensation, that there is no conception that intercourse can be
part of sex, including the first time, instead of sex itself. There is no slow opening up.
no slow, gradual entry; no days and months of sensuality prior to entry and no nights and
hours after entry. Those who learn to eroticize powerlessness will learn to eroticize the
entry itself: the pushing in, the thrusting, the fact of entry with whatever force or
urgency the act requires or the man enjoys. There is virtually no protest about entry as
such from women; virtually no satire from men. A fairly formidable character in Don
DeLillos White Noise, the wife, agrees to read pornography to her husband but she
has one condition:

"I will read," she said. "But I dont want you to
choose anything that has men inside women, quote-quote, or men entering women. I
entered her. He entered me. Were not lobbies or elevators. I
wanted him inside me, as if he could crawl completely in, sign the register, sleep,
eat, so forth. I dont care what these people do as long as they dont enter or
get entered."

Her protests make him hard. The stupidity of the "he entered
her" motif makes her laugh, not kindly. She hates it.

We are not, of course, supposed to be lobbies or elevators. Instead, we
are supposed to be wombs, maternal ones; and the men are trying to get back in away from
all the noise and grief of being adult men with power and responsibility. The stakes for
men are high, as Norman 0. Brown makes clear in prose unusually understated for him:

Coitus successfully performed is incest, a return to the maternal womb;
and the punishment appropriate to this crime, castration. What happens to the penis is
coronation, followed by decapitation12

This is high drama for a prosaic act of commonplace entry. Nothing is
at risk for her, the entered; whereas he commits incest, is crowned king, and has his
thing cutoff. She might like to return to the maternal womb toobecause life outside
it is not easy for her eitherbut she has to be it, for husbands, lovers, adulterous
neighbors, as well as her own children, boys especially. Women rarely dare, as we say,
draw a line: certainly not at the point of entry into our own bodies, sometimes by those
we barely know. Certainly they did not come from there, not originally, not from this womb
belonging to this woman who is being flicked now. And so we have once again the generic
meaning of intercoursehe has to climb back into some womb, maternal enough; he has
to enter it and survive even coronation and decapitation. She is made for that; and what
can it matter to him that in entering her, he is entering this one, real, unique
individual.

And what is entry for her? Entry is the first acceptance in her body
that she is generic, not individual; that she is one of a many that is antagonistic to the
individual interpretation she might have of her own worth, purpose, or intention. Entered,
she accepts her subservience to his psychological purpose if nothing else; she accepts
being confused with his mother and his Aunt Mary and the little girl with whom he used to
play "Doctor." Entered, she finds herself depersonalized into a function and
worth less to him than he is worth to himself: because be broke through, pushed in,
entered. Without him there, she is supposed to feel empty, though there is no vacuum
there, not physiologically. Entered, she finds herself accused of regicide at the end. The
king dead, the muscles of the vagina contract again, suggesting that this will never be
easy, never be solved. Lovely Freud, of course, having discovered projection but always
missing the point, wrote to Jung: "In private I have always thought of Adonis as the
penis; the womans joy when the god she had thought dead rises again is too
transparent!"3 Something, indeed, is too transparent; womens
joy tends to be opaque.

Entered, she has mostly given something up: to Adonis, the king, the
coronation, the decapitation for which she is then blamed; she has given up a dividing
line between her and him. Entered, she then finds out what it is to be occupied: and
sometimes the appropriate imagery is of evil and war, the great spreading evil of how
soldiers enter and contaminate. In the words of Marguerite Duras, "evil is there, at
the gates, against the skin."4 It spreads, like war, everywhere:
"breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled. . .
a prey to the intoxicating passion of occupying that delightful territory, a childs
body, the bodies of those less strong, of conquered peoples."15 She is
describing an older brother she hates here ("I see wartime and the reign of my elder
brother as one"6). She is not describing her lover, an older man
fucking an adolescent girl. flut it is from the sex that she takes the texture of wartime
invasion and occupation, the visceral reality of occupation: evil up against the
skinat the point of entry, just touching the slit; then it breaks in and at the same
time it surrounds everything, and those with power use the conquered who are weaker,
inhabit them as territory.

Physically, the woman in intercourse is a space inhabited, a literal
territory occupied literally: occupied even if there has been no resistance, no force;
even if the occupied person said yes please, yes hurry, yes more. Having a line at the
point of entry into your body that cannot be crossed is different from not having any such
line; and being occupied in your body is different from not being occupied in your body.
It is human to experience these differences whether or not one cares to bring the
consequences of them into consciousness. Humans, including women, construct meaning. That
means that when something happens to us, when we have experiences, we try to find in them
some reason for them, some significance that they have to us or for us. Humans find
meaning in poverty and tyranny and the atrocities of history; those who have suffered most
still construct meaning; and those who know nothing take their ignorance as if it were a
precious, rare clay and they too construct meaning. In this way, humans assert that we
have worth; what has happened to us matters; our time here on earth is not entirely filled
with random events and spurious pain. On the contrary, we can understand some things if we
try hard to learn empathy; we can seek freedom and honor and dignity; that we care about
meaning gives us a human pride that has the fragility of a butterfly and the strength of
tempered steel. The measure of womens oppression is that we do not take
intercourseentry, penetration, occupationand ask or say what it means: to us
as a dominated group or to us as a potentially free and self-determining people. Instead,
intercourse is a loyalty test; and we are not supposed to tell the truth unless it
compliments and upholds the dominant male ethos on sex. We know nothing, of course, about
intercourse because we are women and women know nothing; or because what we know simply
has no significance, entered into as we are. And men know everythingall of
themall the timeno matter how stupid or inexperienced or arrogant or ignorant
they are. Anything men say on intercourse, any attitude they have, is valuable,
knowledgeable, and deep, rooted in the cosmos and the forces of nature as it were: because
they know; because fucking is knowing; because he knew her but she did not know him;
because the God who does not exist framed not only sex but also knowledge that way. Women
do not just lie about orgasm, faking it or saying it is not important. Women lie about
life by not demanding to understand the meaning of entry, penetration, occupation, having
boundaries crossed over, having lesser privacy: by avoiding the difficult, perhaps
impossible (but how will we ever know?) questions of female freedom. We take oaths to
truth all right, on the holy penis before entry. In so doing, we give up the most
important dimension of what it means to be human: the search for the meaning of our real
experience, including the sheer invention of that meaningcalled creativity when men
do it. If the questions make the holy penis unhappy, who could survive what the answers
might do? Experience is chosen for us, then, imposed on us, especially in intercourse, and
so is its meaning. We are allowed to have intercourse on the terms men determine,
according to the rules men make. We do not have to have an orgasm; that terrible burden is
on them.

We are supposed to comply whether we want to or not. Want is active,
not passive or lethargic. Especially we are supposed to be loyal to the male meanings of
intercourse, which are elaborate, dramatic, pulling in elements of both myth and tragedy:
the king is dead! long live the king !and the Emperor wears designer jeans. We have
no freedom and no extravagance in the questions we can ask or the interpretations we can
make. We must be loyal; and on what scale would we be able to reckon the cost of that?
Male sexual discourse on the meaning of intercourse becomes our language. It is not a
second language we speak, however, with perfect fluency even though it does not say what
we mean or what we think we might know if only we could find the right word and enough
privacy in which to articulate it even just in our own minds. We know only this one
language of these folks who enter and occupy us: they keep telling us that we are
different from them; yet we speak only their language and have none, or none that we
remember, of our own; and we do not dare, it seems, invent one, even in signs and
gestures. Our bodies speak their language. Our minds think in it. The men are inside us
through and through. We hear something, a dim whisper, barely audible, somewhere at the
back of the brain; there is some other word, and we think, some of us, sometimes, that
once it belonged to us.

There are female-supremacist models for intercourse that try to make us
the masters of this language that we speak that is not ours. They evade some fundamental
questions about the act itself and acknowledge others. They have in common a glorious
ambition to see women self-determining, vigorous and free lovers who are never demeaned or
diminished by force or subordination, not in society, not in sex. The great advocate of
the female-first model of intercourse in the nineteenth century was Victoria Woodhull. She
understood that rape was slavery; not less than slavery in its insult to human integrity
and human dignity. She acknowledged some of the fundamental questions of female freedom
presented by intercourse in her imperious insistence that women had a natural right
a right that inhered in the nature of intercourse itselfto be entirely
self-determining, the controlling and dominating partner, the one whose desire determined
the event, the one who both initiates and is the final authority on what the sex is and
will be. Her thinking was not mean-spirited, some silly role reversal to make a moral
point; nor was it a taste for tyranny hidden in what pretended to be a sexual ethic. She
simply understood that women are unspeakably vulnerable in intercourse because of the
nature of the actentry, penetration, occupation; and she understood that in a
society of male power, women were unspeakably exploited in intercourse.
Societymenhad to agree to let the woman be the mind, the heart, the lover, the
free spirit, the physical vitality behind the act. The commonplace abuses of forced entry,
the devastating consequences of being powerless and occupied, suggested that the only
condition under which women could experience sexual freedom in intercoursereal
choice, real freedom, real happiness, real pleasurewas in having real and absolute
control in each and every act of intercourse, which would be, each and every time, chosen
by the woman. She would have the incontrovertible authority that would make intercourse
possible:

To woman, by nature, belongs the right of sexual determination. When
the instinct is aroused in her, then and then only should commerce follow. When woman
rises from sexual slavery to sexual freedom, into the ownership and control of her sexual
organs, and man is obliged to respect this freedom, then will this instinct become pure
and holy; then will woman be raised from the iniquity and morbidness in which she now
wallows for existence, and the intensity and glory of her creative functions be increased
a hundred-fold...17

The consent standard is revealed as pallid, weak, stupid, second-class,
by contrast with Woodhulls standard: that the woman should have authority and
control over the act. The sexual humiliation of women through male ownership was
understood by Woodhull to be a concrete reality, not a metaphor, not hyperbole: the man
owned the womans sexual organs. She had to own her sexual organs for intercourse to
mean freedom for her. This is more concrete and more meaningful than a more contemporary
vocabulary of "owning" ones own desire. Woodhull wanted the womans
desire to be the desire of significance; but she understood that ownership of the body was
not an abstraction; it was concrete and it came first. The "iniquity and mor
bidness" of intercourse under male dominance would end if women could exercise a
materially real self-determination in sex. The woman having material control of her own
sex organs and of each and every act of intercourse would not lead to a reverse dominance,
the man subject to the woman, because of the nature of the act and the nature of the sex
organs involved in the act: this is the sense in which Woodhull tried to face the
fundamental questions raised by intercourse as an act with consequences, some perhaps
intrinsic. The woman could not forcibly penetrate the man. The woman could not take him
over as he took her over and occupy his body physically inside. His dominance over her
expressed in the physical reality of intercourse had no real analogue in desire she might
express for hini in intercourse: she simply could not do to him what he could do to her.
Woodhulls view was materialist, not psychological; she was the first publisher of
the Communist Manifesto in the United States and the first woman stockbroker on Wall
Street. She saw sex the way she saw money and power: in terms of concrete physical
reality. Male notions of female power based on psychology or ideas would not have
addressed for her the real issues of physical dominance and power in intercourse. The
woman would not force or rape or physically own the man because she could not. Thus,
giving the woman power over intercourse was giving her the power to be equal.
Woodhulls vision was in fact deeply humane, oriented toward sexual pleasure in
freedom. For women, she thought and proclaimed (at great cost to herself), freedom must be
literal, physical, concrete self-determination beginning with absolute control of the
sexual organs; this was a natural right that had been perverted by male dominanceand
because of its perversion, sex was for women morbid and degrading. The only freedom
imaginable in this act of intercourse was freedom based on an irrevocable and unbreachable
female will given play in a body honestly her own. This was an eloquent answer to reading
the meaning of intercourse the other way: by its nature, intercourse mandated that the
woman must be lesser in power and in privacy. Instead, said Woodhull, the woman must be
king. Her humanity required sexual sovereignty.

Male-dominant gender hierarchy, however, seems immune to reform by
reasoned or visionary

argument or by changes in sexual styles, either personal or social.
This may be because intercourse itself is immune to reform. In it, female is bottom,
stigmatized. Intercourse remains a means or the means of physiologically making a woman
inferior: communicating to her cell by cell her own inferior status, impressing it on her,
burning it into her by shoving it into her, over and over, pushing and thrusting until she
gives up and gives inwhich is called surrender in the male lexicon. In the
experience of intercourse, she loses the Capacity for integrity because her bodythe
basis of privacy and freedom in the material world for all human beingsis entered
and occupied; the boundaries of her physical body areneutrally
speakingviolated. What is taken from her in that act is not recoverable, and she
spends her life wanting, after all, to have somethingpretending that pleasure
is in being reduced through intercourse to insignificance. She will not have an
orgasmmaybe because she has human pride and she resents captivity; but also she will
not or cannot rebelnot enough for it to matter, to end male dominance over her. She
learns to eroticize powerlessness and self-annihilation. The very boundaries of her own
body become meaningless to her, and even worse, useless to her. The transgression of those
boundaries comes to signify a sexually charged degradation into which she throws herself,
having been told, convinced, that identity, for a female, is theresomewhere beyond
privacy and self-respect.

It is not that there is no way out if, for instance, one were to
establish or believe that intercourse itself determines womens lower status. New
reproductive technologies have changed and will continue to change the nature of the
world. Intercourse is not necessary to existence anymore. Existence does not depend on
female compliance, nor on the violation of female boundaries, nor on lesser female
privacy, nor on the physical occupation of the female body. But the hatred of women is a
source of sexual pleasure for men in its own right. Intercourse appears to be the
expression of that contempt in pure form, in the form of a sexed hierarchy; it requires no
passion or heart because it is power without invention articulating the arrogance of those
who do the fucking. Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of mens
contempt for women; but that contempt can turn gothic and express itself in many sexual
and sadistic practices that eschew intercourse per se. Any violation of a womans
body can become sex for men; this is the essential truth of pornography. So freedom from
intercourse, or a social structure that reflects the low value of intercourse in
womens sexual pleasure, or intercourse becoming one sex act among many entered into
by (hypothetical) equals as part of other, deeper, longer, perhaps more sensual
lovemaking, or an end to womens inferior status because we need not be forced to
reproduce (forced flicking frequently justified by some implicit biological necessity to
reproduce):

none of these are likely social developments be-cause there is a hatred
of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice
and sexual passion. Reproductive technologies are strengthening male dominance,
invigorating it by providing new ways of policing womens reproductive capacities,
bringing them under stricter male scrutiny and control; and the experimental development
of these technologies has been sadistic, using human women as if they were sexual
laboratory animalsrats, mice, rabbits, cats, with kinky uteri. For increasing
numbers of men, bondage and torture of the female genitals (that were entered into and
occupied in the good old days) may supplant intercourse as a sexual practice. The passion
for hurting women is a sexual passion; and sexual hatred of women can be expressed without
intercourse.

There has always been a peculiar irrationality to all the biological
arguments that supposedly predetermine the inferior social status of women. Bulls mount
cows and baboons do whatever; but human females do not have estrus or go into heat. The
logical inference is not that we are always available for mounting but rather that we are
never, strictly speaking, "available." Nor do animals have cultures; nor do they
determine in so many things what they will do and how they will do them and what the
meaning of their own behavior is. They do not decide what their lives will be. Only humans
face the often complicated reality of having potential and having to make choices based on
having potential. We are not driven by instinct, at least not much. We have possibilities,
and we make up meanings as we go along. The mean-

rugs we create or learn do not exist only in our heads, in ineffable
ideas. Our meanings also exist

in our bodieswhat we are, what we do, what we physically feel,
what we physically know; and there is no personal psychology that is separate from what
the body has learned about life. Yet when we look at the human condition, including the
condition of woiiien, we act as if we are driven by biology or some metaphysically
absolute dogma. We refuse to recognize our possibilities because we refuse to honor the
potential humans have, including human women, to make choices. Men too make choices. When
will they choose not to despise us?

Being female in this world is having been robbed of the potential for
human choice by men who love to hate us. One does not make choices in freedom. Instead,
one conforms in body type and behavior and values to become an object of male sexual
desire, which requires an abandonment of a wide-ranging capacity for choice.
Objectification may well be the most singly destructive aspect of gender hierarchy,
especially as it exists in relation to intercourse. The surrender occurs before the act
that is supposed to accomplish the surrender takes place. She has given in; why conquer
her? The body is violated before the act occurs that is commonly taken to be violation.
The privacy of the person is lessened before the privacy of the woman is invaded: she has
remade herself so as to prepare the way for the invasion of privacy that her preparation
makes possible. The significance of the human ceases to exist as the value of the object
increases: an expensive ornament, for instance, she is incapable of human freedom
taking it, knowing it, wanting it, being it. Being an objectliving in the realm of
male objectificationis abject submission, an abdication of the freedom and integrity
of the body, its privacy, its uniqueness, its worth in and of itself because it is the
human body of a human being. Can intercourse exist without objectification? Would
intercourse be a different phenomenon if it could, if it did? Would it be shorter or
longer, happier or sadder; more complex, richer, denser, with a baroque beauty or simpler
with an austere beauty; or bang bang bang? Would intercourse without objectification, if
it could exist, be compatible with womens equalityeven an expression of
it or would it still be stubbornly antagonistic to it? Would intercourse cause
orgasm in women if women were not objects for men before and during intercourse? Can
intercourse exist without objectification and can objectification exist without female
complicity in maintaining it as a perceived reality and a material reality too: can
objectification exist without the woman herself turning herself into an
objectbecoming through effort and art a thing, less than human, so that he can be
more than human, hard, sovereign, king? Can intercourse exist without the woman herself
turning herself into a thing, which she must do because men cannot fuck equals and men
must fuck: because one price of dominance is that one is impotent in the face of equality?

To become the object, she takes herself and transforms herself into a
thing: all freedoms are diminished and she is caged, even in the cage docile, sometimes
physically maimed, movement is limited: she physically becomes the thing he wants to fuck.
It is especially in the acceptance of object status that her humanity is hurt: it is a
metaphysical acceptance of lower status in sex and in society; an implicit acceptance of
less freedom, less privacy, less integrity. In becoming an object so that he can objectify
her so that he can flick her, she begins a political collaboration with his dominance; and
then when he enters her, he confirms for himself and for her what she is: that she is
something, not someone; certainly not someone equal.

There is the initial complicity, the acts of self-mutilation,
self-diminishing, self-reconstruction, until there is no self, only the diminished,
mutilated reconstruction. It is all superficial and unimportant, except what it costs the
human in her to do it: except for the fact that it is submissive, conforming, giving up an
individuality that would withstand object status or defy it. Something happens inside; a
human forgets freedom; a human learns obedience; a human, this time a woman, learns how to
goose-step the female way. Wilhelm Reich, that most optimistic of sexual liberatiomsts,
the only male one to abhor rape really, thought that a girl needed not only "a free
genital sexuality" but also "an undisturbed room, proper contraceptives, a
friend who is capable of love, that is, not a National Socialist 18 All remain hard
for women to attain; but especially the lover who is not a National Socialist. So the act
goes beyond complicity to collaboration; but collaboration requires a preparing of the
ground, an undermining of values and vision and dignity, a sense of alienation from the
worth of other human beingsand this alienation is fundamental to females who are
objectifled because they do not experience themselves as human beings of worth except for
their value on the market as objects. Knowing ones own human value is fundamental to
being able to respect others: females are remade into objects, not human in any sense
related to freedom or justiceand so what can females recognize in other females that
is a human bond toward freedom? Is there anything in us to love if we do not love each
other as the objects we have become? Who can love someone who is less than human unless
love itself is domination per se? Alienation from human freedom is deep and destructive;
it destroys whatever it is in us as humans that is creative, that causes us to want to
find meaning in experiences, even hard experiences; it destroys in us that which wants
freedom whatever the hardship of attaining it. In women, these great human capacities and
dimensions are destroyed or mutilated; and so we find ourselves bewilderedwho or
what are these so-called persons in human form but even that not quite, not exactly, who
cannot remember or manifest the physical reality of freedom, who do not seem to want or to
value the individual experience of freedom? Being an object for a man means being
alienated from other womenthose likelier in status, in inferiority, in sexual
function. Collaboration by women with men to keep women civilly and sexually inferior has
been one of the hallmarks of female subordination; we are ashamed when Freud notices it,
but it is true. That collaboration, fully manifested when a woman values her lover, the
National Socialist, above any woman, anyone of her own kind or class or status, may have
simple beginnings: the first act of complicity that destroys self-respect, the capacity
for self-determination and freedomreadying the body for the fuck instead of for
freedom. The men have an answer: intercourse is freedom. Maybe it is secondclass freedom
for second-class humans.

What does it mean to be the person who needs to have this done to her:
who needs to be needed as an object; who needs to be entered; who needs to be occupied;
who needs to be wanted more than she needs integrity or freedom or equality? If
objectification is necessary for intercourse to be possible, what does that mean for the
person who needs to be flicked so that she can experience herself as female and who needs
to be an object so that she can be fucked?

The brilliance of objectification as a strategy of dominance is that it
gets the woman to take the initiative in her own degradation (having less freedom is
degrading). The woman herself takes one kind of responsibility absolutely and thus commits
herself to her own continuing inferiority: she polices her own body; she internalizes the
demands of the dominant class and, in order to be fucked, she constructs her life around
meeting those demands. It is the best system of colonialization on earth: she takes on the
burden, the responsibility, of her own submission, her own objectification. In some
systems in which turning the female into an object for sex requires actual terrorism and
maimingfor instance, footbinding or removing the clitoristhe mother does it,
having had it done to her by her mother. What men need done to women so that men can have
intercourse with women is done to women so that men will have intercourse; no matter what
the human cost; and it is a gross indignity to suggest that when her collaboration is
completeunselfconscious because there is no self and no consciousness leftshe
is free to have freedom in intercourse. When those who dominate you get you to take the
initiative in your own human destruction, you have lost more than any oppressed people yet
has ever gotten back. Whatever intercourse is, it is not freedom; and if it cannot exist
without objectification, it never will be. Instead occupied women will be collaborators,
more base in their collaboration than other collaborators have ever been: experiencing
pleasure in their own inferiority; calling intercourse freedom. It is a tragedy beyond the
power of language to convey when what has been imposed on women by force becomes a
standard of freedom for women: and all the women say it is so.

If intercourse can be an expression of sexual equality, it will have to
surviveon its own merits as it were, having a potential for human expression not yet
recognized or realizedthe destruction of male power over women; and rape and
prostitution will have to be seen as the institutions that most impede any experience of
intercourse as freedomchosen by full human beings with full human freedom. Rape and
prostitution negate self-determination and choice for women; and anyone who wants
intercourse to be freedom and to mean freedom had better find a way to get rid of them.
Maybe life is tragic and the God who does not exist made women inferior so that men could
fuck us; or maybe we can only know this much for certainthat when intercourse exists
and is experienced under conditions of force, fear, or inequality, it destroys in women
the will to political freedom; it destroys the love of freedom itself. We become female:
occupied; collaborators against each other, especially against those among us who resist
male domination-the lone, crazy resisters, the organized resistance. The pleasure of
submission does not and cannot change the fact, the cost, the indignity, of inferiority.